Two opposites dancing together

Non-violence has always seemed a bit passive, as if it isn’t effective enough to eliminate violence. But perhaps that’s the point – we shouldn’t want to kill off anything and that includes violence itself. Instead we should accept that one lives alongside the other. It’s the nature of the planet. Alongside disease there’s an immune system; the disease is the attacker, the other the defender. During one of Nature’s violent gales the stalk of wheat bends but doesn’t break. It’s built for wind - the tension on the stalk brings about the strength the stalk needs. This is the tension between opposites, the push-me-pull-you of our own thinking and all human-made ideas.
Non-violence confronts and then withdraws. It dances with violence. It lets the violence-based world make its impact, all the sooner to burn itself out. Then a period of non-violence starts to make a different sort of impact. At this point in time, after the violence of the twentieth century, we’re in transition, clinging to violence because it’s been passed-down to us as a method for getting things done … but wanting it gone. Now, in a new era, non-violent values are beginning to solve some of our problems. But, like veganism itself, these values still make small impact. For most people they go largely untested. So for non-violence enthusiasts, patience is golden. Especially in helping us to come to terms with the violence of our world. If non-violence is to be the modus operandi of our new age, it would seem fairly urgent to recognise how violent we may be personally. In big ways or in little routine ways. Non-violence: we shouldn’t run with it before we can walk with it; we shouldn’t preach it before we can practise it.